Black Boys and Black Girls in Comics: an Affective and Historical Mapping of Intertwined Stereotypes

For correct citation, please refer to the printed version The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies, edited by Frederick L. Aldama, Routledge 2020, pp. 28-41. Black boys and black girls in comics: an affective and historical mapping of intertwined stereotypes Maaheen Ahmed Abstract This chapter examines the representation of black boys and black girls in comics, with a strong focus on early comics from the late nineteenth century. It combines the study of gender with the study of racist representations. Weaving connections with related cultural products such as animation and children’s literature, the chapter shows how racist stereotypes permeate representations of black children regardless of gender. Performative and persistent racist stereotypes such as the pickaninny transcend genders and coalesce the bodies of both black boys and black girls. Although black boys outnumber black girls in comics, they channel stereotypes that can be traced back to the visualization of Topsy, the slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This chapter proposes the concept of soft hate in order to explain how denigrating imagery persists and serves as a conduit of racist sentiment even in contexts that would otherwise condemn such feelings. We are only too painfully familiar with racialized imagery in comics, cartoons and other media, especially those relying on caricatural styles. We are also all too familiar with the argument that such representations were inevitable for their times: the artists didn’t know better; the exaggerated idiom of caricature was the only way othered (non-white) people were recognizable; caricature spares no one and deforms in the service of humor; etc. In this chapter, I unpack stereotypes of black boys and black girls that traveled between popular imagery (especially advertisements and prints) and popular entertainment (minstrelsy and vaudeville), illustrated children’s literature, dolls and comics to interrogate the rigidity of derogatory stereotypes of black children and their persistence in the face of more conciliatory representations. I begin with the rise of derogatory stereotypes of African Americans in mid to late nineteenth-century American culture (Bernstein, “Signposts” 99–100; Black), which was also a period when the illustrated press boomed. I then discuss racial stereotypes in early British and American comics. The chapter closes with a discussion of a contemporary comic, Boondocks, that subverts and criticizes those stereotypes. In the case of black comic strip characters, prominent girl comics characters seem to be by and large absent. Notably even the few relatively famous boy characters – such as Richard Outcault’s Poor Lil Mose and Peanut in Beano – were short-lived because they did not attract many readers and their place as central characters was not considered legitimate even in the context of comics which has been home to several outcast protagonists. This highlights the extent to which racial prejudice is taken for granted. The persistence and acceptability of harmful stereotypes can be better understood by turning to Sara Ahmed’s concept of stickiness and focusing on the emotions potentially evoked in (non-black) readers and viewers of such stereotypes. In dialoguing between past and present representations and the kinds of affects and emotions they channel and evoke, I trace the contours of what seems to be a carefully constructed architecture of soft hate. The political scientist Joseph Nye famously described soft power as the exercise of control through economic and cultural forces. Soft hate simultaneously relies on these forces and is channeled through popular images. Nye’s simple dictionary definition of power is worth recalling: “power means an ability to do things and control others, to get others to do what they otherwise would not do” (Nye 1990, 154). Soft hate wields a similar kind of power: it is hatred that sneaks through nooks and crannies of images that have some offensive elements but have become acceptable because of their good-natured sheen which, in the case of comics, is reinforced by their intention to entertain and provoke laughter. Soft hate is at work in very ordinary means of figuring hate and includes images that are just assumed to be part of comics vocabulary. A mechanism of hate is anchored in the tools of visual representation, especially in the reliance on stereotypes. That derogatory stereotypes of black people, which usually incorporated grotesquely exaggerated childish elements, became a standard means of representation was by no means simply an entertaining twist of caricature. Soft hate captures the hating impulse hidden in images that are otherwise seen as cute and harmless and are used in the service of consumer culture, including children’s culture. Stereotypes for all their flatness and unoriginality are layered with history that remains buried or ignored and complacency that is, against all odds, persistent (cf. Rosello 22–25). And since stereotypes are sneaky, sometimes it takes a lot of digging in order to realize just how pernicious they can be, even, and perhaps especially when they look like seemingly harmless images, serving to entertain. Such images call for a constant revisiting. This back-and-forth movement runs parallel to what Sara Ahmed describes as the “‘rippling’ effect of emotions”, which “move sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures and objects) as well as forwards and backwards”. “Repression”, Ahmed adds, “always leaves its trace in the present – hence ‘what sticks’ is bound ‘presence’ of historicity” (45). It is therefore important to look back and to look underneath stereotypes. Minstrelsy, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Pickaninny Both Jim Crow and Zip Coon were familiar characters in minstrel shows which relied on blackface to enact a fantasy of “Africanness”. They began around the 1830s, became popular in the mid-nineteenth century and disappeared in the 1930s, when they were widely perceived as inappropriate (Rehin 682). The 1930s saw the rise of the animated, and eventually cartoony, funny animal, which is where blackface and other minstrel practices found a new, acceptable home (Sammond; Nel). This is only one example of how the relationship between comics and racist imagery is deeply entangled with other popular practices and entrenched in layers of repressive history. Jim Crow was the mock happy, intensely performative slave of the rural south. According to sociologist George F. Rehin, Jim Crow draws connections between the clownish servant “type” (the zanni in commedia dell arte acts) and what became the “harlequin jim crow” or blackface clown in nineteenth- century America and Britain. Unlike Jim Crow, Zip Coon is a free black person from the urban north, with dandyish airs, who aspires to achieve white standards of propriety, but always fails. He undoes the freedom that was gradually granted to slaves throughout the United States in the mid-1800s, a period which, significantly enough, coincided with the rise of the minstrel show. Both types incarnate repression, ranging from the open repression of the slave or former slave to the mockery of the freed man. The main female stereotype is that of the black nanny or “mammy”, expected to take care of white children and ignore her own (Wallace-Sanders). In children’s culture and comics and later films, stereotypes of black children seem to combine elements from both Jim Crow and Zip Coon. These children were referred to as small coons or pickaninnies. Like Jim Crow and Zip Coon, they were flattened out, intensely performative characters, who were ambiguous at best and usually just unlikeable. More crucially, these characters were also denied humanity. Robin Bernstein describes the pickaninny as a stereotype whose “juvenile status, dark skin, and, crucially, the state of being comically impervious to pain” coexisted with that of the “white, tender, vulnerable angel-child” (Bernstein, Racial Innocence 20). The cheekily smiling, harmless pickaninny is both a product and vehicle of soft hate. Bernstein reminds us that since “childhood was defined as tender innocence, as vulnerability, and as the pickaninny was defined by the inability to feel or to suffer, then the pickaninny—and the black juvenile it purported to represent—was defined out of childhood” (20). This follows an emotional trajectory described by Ahmed, according to which hate “works to unmake the world of the other through pain” (58) – it turns bodies into objects and renders them vulnerable to the hate they are exposed to. Such hate can smear itself on the identity of an entire group of people. The stereotype of the black child which is used to cancel all positive elements associated with childhood can be traced back to the portrayal of Topsy, the slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel and the illustrations accompanying it facilitated the transatlantic transfer of racist, minstrelsy imagery (cf. Bernstein, “Signposts”). Blackface performances however also have a history in Britain that goes as far back as the nineteenth century (Rehin 686). Originally subtitled, “The Man That Was a Thing” (Bernstein, Racial Innocence 17), Uncle Tom’s Cabin was serialized in the abolitionist National Era from 1851 onward. It is then bitterly ironic that we find the stereotype of the pickaninny here. On first seeing the “project” her cousin imposes on her, Miss Ophelia exclaims, “She’s dreadfully dirty, and half naked”. The first thing to do is, of course, to clean and clothe Topsy. The paragraph introducing Topsy describes her as the “blackest of her race”, her hair is “wooly” and “sticks out in every direction”, her expression “is an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity” (Stowe 155). The word “odd” appears twice in this description, reinforcing a sense of doubt and mistrust. She wears a “single filthy garment made of bagging” and, to sum up, there is “something odd and goblin- like about her” (155–156).

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